Cloaks, Daggers, and Dice

Thursday, March 16th, 2017

South by Southwest included a talk called Cloaks, Daggers, and Dice, which examined how the CIA uses games:

In “Collection,” Clopper’s first CIA game, teams of analysts work together to solve international crises against a ticking clock. His second title, “Collection Deck,” is a Pokémon-like card game in which where each card represents either an intelligence collection strategy or a hurdle like red tape or bureaucracy.

[...]

Also speaking on the panel was Volko Ruhnke, who is an intelligence educator at the CIA and a freelance game designer. Ruhnke said he is particularly interested in one type of game: a simulation tabletop game to train analysts and help with analytic tasks. It could help forecast complex situations by forcing players to handle multiple scenarios simultaneously.

Ruhnke himself created a commercial board game to simulate the Afghanistan conflict and walk players through military, political, and economic issues in the region. It gives players “a much more dynamic understanding of the issues of modern Afghanistan,” Ruhnke said, adding that a similar game could be of use internally at the CIA as well.

Volko Ruhnke is famous — in the wargaming community — for designing the card-driven wargames Labyrinth: The War on Terror, 2001–? and Wilderness War. He was also the original designer of GMT Games’ COIN series, which includes Cuba Libre, A Distant Plain, and Liberty or Death: American Insurrection.

Posted in Education, Games, Policy, War | No Comments »

Neoliberal management may reduce productivity

Thursday, March 16th, 2017

Chris Dillow suggests some ways that neoliberal management may reduce productivity:

Good management can be bad for investment and innovation. William Nordhaus has shown that the profits from innovation are small. And Charles Lee and Salman Arif have shown that capital spending is often motivated by sentiment rather than by cold-minded appraisal with the result that it often leads to falling profits. We can interpret the slowdowns in innovation and investment as evidence that bosses have wised up to these facts. Also, an emphasis upon cost-effectiveness, routine and best practice can deny employees the space and time to experiment and innovate. Either way, Joseph Schumpeter’s point seems valid: capitalist growth requires a buccaneering spirit which is killed off by rational bureaucracy.

As Jeffrey Nielsen has argued, “rank-based” organizations can demotivate more junior staff, who expect to be told what to do rather than use their initiative.

The high-powered incentives offered to bosses can backfire. They can incentivize rent-seeking, office politics and jockeying for the top job rather than getting on with one’s work. They can crowd out intrinsic motivations such as professional pride. And they can divert (pdf) managers towards doing tasks that are easily monitored rather than ones which are important to an organization but harder to measure: for example, cost-cutting can be monitored and incentivized but maintaining a healthy corporate culture is less easily measured and so can be neglected by crude incentive schemes.

Empowering management can increase opposition to change. As McAfee and Brynjolfsson have shown, reaping the benefits of technical change often requires organizational change. But well-paid bosses have little reason to want to rock the boat by undertaking such change. The upshot is that we are stuck in what van Ark calls (pdf) the “installation phase” of the digital economy rather than the deployment phase. As Joel Mokyr has said, the forces of conservatism eventually suppress technical creativity.

Posted in Economics | 2 Comments »

Pizzas, Loudspeakers and Moms

Wednesday, March 15th, 2017

US psy ops are drawing away members of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army with flyers and recorded messages from their families:

Leaflet campaigns saw widespread use in the Vietnam War, and the psyop team still relies on a 1960s military publication called the “Low, Medium and High Altitude Leaflet Dissemination Guide.” The guide was intended to add science to the art of tossing paper out of a moving plane, and it describes how to fit a message to a particular leaflet size and how to account for wind, air density and aircraft speed in planning a drop.

In Central Africa, the psyop team estimates it has dropped half a million leaflets over the past six months. Mr. Kony, according to defectors, tells his followers the leaflets are poisonous to the touch. He also warns them that the Americans can spy on rebels through the leaflets.

Mr. Ocitti’s family-tracking allows the psyop team to put rebels’ actual family photos on leaflets. Defectors sometimes turn themselves in with U.S.-made leaflets hidden in their pockets.

Posted in War | 1 Comment »

The nine strategic consequences of Chinese racism

Wednesday, March 15th, 2017

A rather unusual report evaluates the nine strategic consequences of Chinese racism:

First, virulent racism and eugenics heavily inform Chinese perceptions of the world. United States decision-makers must recognize that China is a racist state, much closer to Nazi Germany than to the values upheld in the West. Most often, the Chinese do not even recognize their racism as a problem. They believe that racism is a Western phenomenon and that Westerners are obsessed with race. This obsession is seen by the Chinese to be a strategic vulnerability of the West, whereas China is not affected by racism.

Second, racism informs their view of the United States. From the Chinese perspective, the United States used to be a strong society that the Chinese respected when it was unicultural, defined by the centrality of Anglo-Protestant culture at the core of American national identity aligned with the political ideology of liberalism, the rule of law, and free market capitalism. The Chinese see multiculturalism as a sickness that has overtaken the United States, and a component of U.S. decline.

Third, racism informs their view of international politics in three ways. First, states are stable, and thus good for the Chinese, to the degree that they are unicultural. Second, Chinese ethnocentrism and racism drive their outlook to the rest of the world. Their expectation is of a tribute system where barbarians know that the Chinese are superior. Third, there is a strong, implicit, racialist view of international politics that is alien and anathema to Western policy-makers and analysts. The Chinese are comfortable using race to explain events and appealing to racist stereotypes to advance their interests. Most insidious is the Chinese belief that Africans in particular need Chinese leadership.

Fourth, the Chinese will make appeals to Third World states based on “racial solidarity,” that is, the need of non-white peoples to unite against Western imperialism and racism. Racial solidarity claims are easy for Chinese to accomplish since the Chinese can make strategic racist claims. For example, they can frame international politics in terms of a “racial balance of power,” and cast appeals to the Third World along the line of: now is the time for non-whites to dominate international politics.

Fifth, Chinese racism retards their relations with the Third World. Chinese racism makes it difficult for China to advance a positive message in the Third World, especially Africa, but also in Latin America and the Middle East. The Chinese have a hierarchical representation of looking at other groups, darker skin is lower class, and race matters. In this sense, the racial stereotypes of the Africans commonly found within Chinese society suggest that this population is backward and dirty, and prone to crime, particularly violent crime. These beliefs surface regularly in China’s relations with the Third World and these beliefs, coupled with clannish and ruthless Chinese business practices, generate enormous resentment in the Third World.

Sixth, Chinese racism, and the degree to which the Chinese permit their view of the United States to be informed by racism, has the potential to hinder China in its competition with the United States because it contributes to their overconfidence. This overconfidence is a result of ethnocentrism and a sense of superiority rooted in racism. The Chinese commonly believe that they are cleverer than others, and so may shape events in an oblique manner or through shi, the strategic manipulation of events. This conceit among the Chinese that they can manipulate others is supremely dangerous for Asian stability. At the same time, it is a great advantage for the United States to play upon that overconfidence. An overconfident China will continue to make the mistakes it is presently in the South China or East China Sea disputes. That is, making threats, issuing demands, heavy-handed shows of force, are generated by China’s overconfidence.

Seventh, as lamentable as it is, Chinese racism helps to make the Chinese a formidable adversary. There are three critical consequences that result from this. The first is the sense of unity the Chinese possess. Second, it allows the Chinese to have a strong sense of identity, which in turn permits them to weather adversity, and to be focused and secure confidence that the rest of the nation is with them. Third, China is not plagued by self-doubt or guilt about its past.

Eight, the Chinese are never going to go through a civil rights movement like the United States. This is because, first, they have no freedom of the press, freedom to petition their government, freedom to assemble, all of which are necessary to support a civil rights movement. Second, there is no political drive or consciousness for equality in Chinese thought. Equality is associated with Maoism and rejected in today’s China, where inequality is accepted and celebrated. In addition, there is no notion of civil rights in Chinese political thought or, practically, in jurisprudence.

Ninth, China’s treatment of Christians and ethnic minorities is poor. The government recognizes that religion is able to do many positive acts in a society, and they do see the need for people to have a moral, religious grounding provided by religion since a moral framework may be lost in the demands of a market economy. The current debate is an echo of the one they had in the 1800s, how do they preserve the essence of what is Chinese in an era dominated by Western ideas. Yet, the government is fearful of religion in the sense that uncontrolled religion may be a threat; a challenge to Beijing’s authority. Not surprisingly, the treatment of ethnic minorities is equally bad.

Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments »

Kerensky’s Missed Opportunity

Tuesday, March 14th, 2017

One hundred years ago Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, ending 300 years of Romanov rule of Russia, and this so-called February Revolution presents one of the great what-ifs of history:

If this revolution — which actually took place in early March 1917 according to the West’s Gregorian calendar (Russia adopted that calendar only later) — had succeeded in producing a constitutional democracy in place of the czarist empire as its leaders hoped, the world would be a very different place.

If the leading figure in the provisional government, Aleksandr Kerensky, had seized on an opportunity presented by a now-forgotten vote in the German Reichstag, World War I might have been over before American troops reached Europe. In this alternative history, Lenin and Stalin would be obscure footnotes, and Hitler would never have been more than a failed painter.

Aleksandr Kerensky reviewing the troops in 1917

What is surprising, to anyone who has absorbed the standard victor’s view — according to which the Allies were fighting a defensive war to liberate small states — is that Britain was disingenuous about its war aims, while France declined to state them at all. The reason is that those aims were too discreditable to avow openly. In a series of secret treaties, they agreed in the event of victory to carve up the empires of their defeated enemies.

From the Russian viewpoint, the big prize was the Turkish capital, Constantinople, now called Istanbul; this was promised to Russia in a secret agreement in 1915. The subsequent publication of this and other secret treaties by the Bolsheviks did much to discredit the Allied cause.

Kerensky could have repudiated the deals made by the czarist empire and announced his willingness to accept the Reichstag formula of peace without annexations or indemnities. Perhaps the German High Command would have ignored the offer and continued fighting (as it did when the Bolsheviks offered the same terms after the October Revolution at the end of 1917). But the circumstances were far more favorable in July than they were at the end of 1917. As the Kerensky offensive demonstrated, the Russian Army, while demoralized, was still an effective fighting force, and the front line was far closer to the territory of the Central Powers. Moreover, Kerensky commanded credibility with the Western Allies that he could have used to good effect.

Kerensky’s determination to continue the war was a disaster. Within a few months, the armed forces were in open revolt. Lenin, who was transported across Germany in a sealed train with the High Command’s acquiescence in the hope that he would help to knock Russia out of the war, seized the opportunity. The provisional government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks in the October Revolution. This Bolshevik Revolution consigned the February Revolution to historical oblivion.

After accepting a humiliating treaty imposed by the Germans, Russia was soon embroiled in a civil war more bloody and brutal than even World War I. By its end, the Bolshevik government, launched as a workers’ democracy, was effectively a dictatorship, enabling the ascendancy of a previously obscure Bolshevik, Joseph Stalin, who would become one of the great tyrants of history. On the other side, the German High Command’s rejection of peace similarly led to defeat, national humiliation and the emergence of the 20th century’s other great tyrant, Adolf Hitler.

We cannot tell whether a positive response from Kerensky to the Reichstag peace initiative would have achieved anything. But it is hard to imagine an outcome worse than the one that actually took place.

Posted in Policy, War | 4 Comments »

Homeowners’ Quest for the Best Schools

Tuesday, March 14th, 2017

Parents will move to a new neighborhood and pay a huge premium to live near a good school:

For some home buyers, there is no factor more important than the public schools their children will attend. They analyze student-body performance on standardized tests, school rankings, what percentage of alumni go on to four-year colleges and which schools send students to Ivy League or top-tier state universities. They then uproot their lives to move within these districts’ boundaries, where homes can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars more than nearby homes zoned to different schools.

In La Cañada Flintridge, Calif., a city in Los Angeles county, the acclaimed La Cañada Unified School District determines the real-estate market, agents say. “I’m very busy in March, when the private-school rejection letters go out,” said Anne Sanborn, a real-estate agent with Sotheby’s International Realty in Pasadena. When parents find out their kids haven’t been accepted at elite private schools, they start house hunting in La Cañada, Ms. Sanborn said.

Ms. Sanborn added that “there is a mass exodus from La Cañada when their kids graduate high school,” as families sell their homes and seek neighborhoods closer to downtown Los Angeles or Pasadena.

Parents don’t seem to care which way the causality runs:

Online tools that measure student performance have made it easier for home buyers and agents to assess schools across the country.

For example, GreatSchools, an Oakland, Calif., nonprofit, rates schools based primarily on how well students perform on statewide assessments and has provided rankings to real-estate websites Zillow, Trulia, Move and Realtor, said Weezie Hough, director of strategic partnerships.

In an analysis of 1.6 million home listings in the U.S. through the first six months of 2016, Realtor.com found that houses in public-school districts with GreatSchools ratings of 9 or 10, the highest scores possible, were priced, on average, 77% higher than homes in nearby districts with scores of 6 or lower. Additionally, homes located in top districts sell four days faster — at 58 days — than the national median of 62 days, the analysis found.

Posted in Education | 2 Comments »

Bright Eyes

Monday, March 13th, 2017

Researchers have confirmed that baseline pupil size is related to cognitive ability. Bright people look bright.

Posted in Science | 4 Comments »

Visionary Leadership and Flying

Monday, March 13th, 2017

There seems to be a connections between visionary leadership and flying:

Thrill-seeking chief executives who pilot planes in their spare time are more likely to inspire original thinking at their companies, says Jingjing Zhang, an accounting professor at McGill University and co-author of a new study that surveyed more than 1,200 men and women in the top job between 1993 and 2003.

[...]

“Pilot CEOs are very different from other people, willing to take more risks in seeking the experience and sensations related to flying and innovation,” Ms. Zhang says, adding that many of the adventurous business leaders surveyed also raced cars or engaged in daring outdoor sports such as skydiving.

Using certificate records from the Federal Aviation Administration, the researchers found companies with a pilot in the top job spent more on research and development on average, and produced nearly twice as many patents each year as those with a nonpilot CEO. Moreover, those patents tended to be more diverse and interdisciplinary, and had a higher impact, inspiring further innovation.

The desire to learn how to fly small aircraft says a lot about someone’s willingness to seek out new and exciting opportunities that entail risk. It is a hobby shared by Larry Ellison, co-founder of software giant Oracle Corp.; the late Wal-Mart Stores Inc. boss, Sam Walton, and Virgin Group’s Richard Branson.

Posted in Business | 1 Comment »

Dismal Voucher Results Surprise Researchers

Sunday, March 12th, 2017

Three new studies show surprisingly bad results from school vouchers:

The first results came in late 2015. Researchers examined an Indiana voucher program that had quickly grown to serve tens of thousands of students under Mike Pence, then the state’s governor. “In mathematics,” they found, “voucher students who transfer to private schools experienced significant losses in achievement.” They also saw no improvement in reading.

The next results came a few months later, in February, when researchers published a major study of Louisiana’s voucher program. Students in the program were predominantly black and from low-income families, and they came from public schools that had received poor ratings from the state department of education, based on test scores. For private schools receiving more applicants than they could enroll, the law required that they admit students via lottery, which allowed the researchers to compare lottery winners with those who stayed in public school.

They found large negative results in both reading and math. Public elementary school students who started at the 50th percentile in math and then used a voucher to transfer to a private school dropped to the 26th percentile in a single year. Results were somewhat better in the second year, but were still well below the starting point.

This is very unusual. When people try to improve education, sometimes they succeed and sometimes they fail. The successes usually register as modest improvements, while the failures generally have no effect at all. It’s rare to see efforts to improve test scores having the opposite result. Martin West, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, calls the negative effects in Louisiana “as large as any I’ve seen in the literature” — not just compared with other voucher studies, but in the history of American education research.

There’s always the chance that a single study, no matter how well designed, is an outlier. Studies of older voucher programs in Milwaukee and elsewhere have generally produced mixed results, sometimes finding modest improvements in test scores, but only for some subjects and student groups. Until about a year ago, however, few if any studies had shown vouchers causing test scores to decline drastically.

In June, a third voucher study was released by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank and proponent of school choice. The study, which was financed by the pro-voucher Walton Family Foundation, focused on a large voucher program in Ohio. “Students who use vouchers to attend private schools have fared worse academically compared to their closely matched peers attending public schools,” the researchers found. Once again, results were worse in math.

If the voucher programs are new, and all the existing private schools are aimed at (slightly) better-than-average students, perhaps the schools are just a terrible fit.

Posted in Education, Policy | 10 Comments »

The Only Thing That’s Curbed Inequality

Saturday, March 11th, 2017

The only thing that’s curbed inequality has been catastrophe, Walter Scheidel notes:

Throughout history, only massive, violent shocks that upended the established order proved powerful enough to flatten disparities in income and wealth. They appeared in four different guises: mass-mobilization warfare, violent and transformative revolutions, state collapse, and catastrophic epidemics. Hundreds of millions perished in their wake, and by the time these crises had passed, the gap between rich and poor had shrunk.

[...]

But what of less murderous mechanisms of combating inequality? History offers little comfort. Land reform often foundered or was subverted by the propertied. Successful programs that managed to parcel out land to the poor and made sure they kept it owed much to the threat or exercise of violence, from Mexico during its revolution to postwar Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Just as with the financial crisis of 2008, macroeconomic downturns rarely hurt the rich for more than a few years. Democracy on its own does not consistently lower inequality. And while improving access to education can indeed narrow income gaps, it is striking to see that American wage premiums for the credentialed collapsed precisely during both world wars.

Posted in Economics, Policy, War | 2 Comments »

Our magic beats theirs

Friday, March 10th, 2017

“You see, we’re not afraid of Boko Haram’s magic,” a Nigerian vigilante says, “because we have our own. Our magic beats theirs.”

At first glance the corrugated tin shack with its display of dried plants and powders in empty rice sacks spilling outside and animal skins tacked to the front door seems like any other roadside spice market or traditional medicine shop here in northeast Nigeria. But this humble depot is where members of the Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF) — a vigilante group integral to the Nigerian government’s counterinsurgency operations — procure the charms and amulets they believe protect them from the terrorists of Boko Haram.

Even before arriving at the shop, members of the CJTF from Bama, a city ravaged by the insurgency, giddily emptied their pockets, revealing a wealth of amulets. Pointing to bullet holes on their pickup truck from a recent raid into the rebel-infested Sambisa Forest, the members credit their safety to the amulets in their pockets, the special potions they bathed in and drank before the raid, and the charms they put in seat cushions of the car.

Manning the traditional medicine shop is the gregarious, flamboyant “Buba Saliki.” Draped in an intricately embroidered tunic with a floppy and worn cap, he greets the CJTF members with warm embraces. Pointing out their grins, he brags, “I am the king of the hunters,” another name for vigilantes in the region. “They can come to me for anything.”

He displays a leather band with several crudely sewn satchels dangling from it, explaining the significance of each charm. “This one, it will prevent the bullet from hitting your body”; his fingers slide to the next charm, “This one, it prevents your enemies from seeing you… It lets you see what you are hunting first”; the next, “It will wiggle and shake if you are going someplace dangerous.”

Each charm is filled with local medicine or papers with prayers scribbled on them. These protections don’t come cheap — Buba Saliki estimates that he could sell each for 150,000 to 200,000 naira (roughly $350-$500).

A relieved CJTF member cuts in to report that the CJTF gets these charms for free, as a gift from Buba Saliki. The vigilantes smile gratefully. Buba Saliki responds with a magnanimous grin and enthusiastic nodding.

It took Buba Saliki 20 years to learn the trade, starting from when he was 9 and studying under his grandfather. He, of course, doesn’t merely make amulets for vigilantes; much of his business comes from selling traditional medicine to cure town residents of “typhoid, malaria, and their eye problems.” His work has become more difficult recently, as Boko Haram’s reign of violence has complicated the process of “going to the bush to retrieve the local medicines,” but he has made do.

While the efficacy of the charms is subject to debate — when a CJTF member who asks to be called Kashim is questioned about a comrade who recently died in a fight against Boko Haram, Kashim says with a wry smile, “Up to now we don’t have a charm against bomb fragments…”

Whether you think of all this in terms of the placebo effect or psychological warfare or something more pejorative, Buba Saliki is like a one-man USO for the vigilantes, sustaining their morale in a very dangerous fight.

Before we leave his shop, he insists on demonstrating how powerful his charms are. The vigilantes excitedly agree and assemble themselves into a semicircle around the entrance, all making sure that they have a good view.

Buba Saliki takes off his shirt, ties on a belt of charms, and takes a swig of a potion from a beaten-up plastic water bottle. He begins his performance by sharpening the rough knives strewn across his shop floor; with a flourish, he cuts through sheets of paper, demonstrating their sharpness. Then he rubs the paper against his charms and tries to cut it again — the knives seem to slide off of the edges of the paper. He begins to saw harder — but the paper will not relent. He takes another sheet of paper and shreds it with the knife. Smiling to the crowd, he takes that knife to his own body, making exaggerated slicing movements across his chest and stomach. Each swing of his arm is punctuated by a whistling that sounds eerily like a dog’s squeaky toy. He turns the knife to his eyes, making movements as if he would slice them open or gouge them out. His mouth and nose are assaulted next, then he even puts the knife to his throat — yet it seems he is unaffected.

Posted in War | 1 Comment »

No invertebrate on land would have been a match for it

Friday, March 10th, 2017

The earliest tetrapods had much bigger eyes than their fishy forebears, and those bigger eyes evolved before walking legs:

Eyes don’t fossilize, but you can estimate how big they would have been by measuring the eye sockets of a fossilized skull. MacIver and his colleagues, including fossil eye expert Lars Schmitz, did this for the skulls of 59 species — from finned fish to intermediate fishapods to legged tetrapods. They showed that over 12 million years, the group’s eyes nearly tripled in size. Why?

Eyes are expensive organs: it takes a lot of energy to maintain them, and even more so if they’re big. If a fish is paying those costs, the eyes must provide some kind of benefit. It seems intuitive that bigger eyes let you see better or further, but MacIver’s team found otherwise. By simulating the kinds of shallow freshwater environments where their fossil species lived — day to night, clear to murky — they showed that bigger eyes make precious little difference underwater. But once those animals started peeking out above the waterline, everything changed. In the air, a bigger eye can see 10 times further than it could underwater, and scan an area that’s 5 million times bigger.

In the air, it’s also easier for a big eye to pay for itself. A predator with short-range vision has to constantly move about to search the zone immediately in front of its face. But bigger-eyes species could spot prey at a distance, and recoup the energy they would otherwise have spent on foraging. “Long-range vision gives you a free lunch,” says MacIver. “You can just look around, instead of moving to inspect somewhere else.”

Tiktaalik with Eyes Above Surface

Those early hunters would have seen plenty of appetizing prey. Centipedes and millipedes had colonized the land millions of years before, and had never encountered fishapod predators. “I imagine guys like Tiktaalik lurking there like a crocodile, waiting for a giant millipede to walk by, and chomping on it,” says MacIver. “No invertebrate on land would have been a match for it.”

Posted in Animals, Science | No Comments »

Absorbent Beads Could Save Energy

Friday, March 10th, 2017

Porous zeolite beads could cut the energy used in large-scale drying operations in half, according to UC Davis plant scientist Kent Bradford:

The beads were developed by Rhino Research in Thailand. Bradford and his collaborators there have spent several years testing and refining the technology with local farmers in that country as well as in India, Nepal, Kenya, and other tropical nations, where as much as a third of crops are lost before reaching consumers. In those areas, the beads are placed alongside, say, harvested rice or maize seeds, separated in mesh sacks or screened-in compartments within containers. They then capture water from the air, significantly reducing the moisture that leads to rot and fungal infections.

Now the researchers are working to bring the technology to richer nations at the industrial scale, exploring its use to dry harvested almonds, walnuts, rice, and grains. Typically, farming operations blow hot air through harvested crops as they pass through drying towers or silos. But experiments show that ambient air can work just as well, if it’s first dried by passing it through the beads. The researchers also believe this approach can improve the quality of the end product, because uneven air heating frequently scorches parts of the batch, ruining the taste of nuts and other foods.

The beads themselves still need to be heated in the end, in order to remove the water so they can be reused. But that can be done in a compact space like an oven, which is far more efficient than blowing around heated air.

Posted in Science | No Comments »

The Biological Origins of Higher Civilizations

Thursday, March 9th, 2017

Elfnonationalist explores the biological origins of higher civilizations:

It is my opinion that the most successful civilized nations of Europe, namely, Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Germany, (and to a lesser degree, Northern Italy, Spain, Scandinavia, and Russia) have been so successful, not necessarily due to early adoption of manorialism, but rather due to this balance of genetic input from both genetically pacified farmers, who were accustomed to a settled, relatively peaceful existence, as well as the more mobile, “barbaric” in Nietzschean terms, Indo-Europeans who were descended primarily from hunters and fishers who had recently adopted a highly competitive pastoralist lifestyle on the Pontic steppe (see David W. Anthony’s The Horse, the Wheel, and Language). The aristocracies of early Greece and Rome would have also possessed this ideal mix of genetically inherited traits, being descended from Indo-European invaders who married local Neolithic farmers, introducing the early Greek and Italic languages into the Mediterranean basin. This aristocracy is practically gone now, however, through an overwhelming genetic absorption into the conquered Neolithic farmer populace, who were ultimately descended primarily from early Near-Eastern agriculturalists.

The end result of the ideal genetic admixture which I have described is a people which are both civilized and politically organized, and also are also willing to innovate, take risks (like exploring the New World), and challenge old notions of thought, as was done in the scientific revolution.

Posted in Policy, Science | 5 Comments »

Trump’s aggression would never be tolerated in a woman

Wednesday, March 8th, 2017

After watching the second televised debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, Maria Guadalupe, an associate professor of economics and political science at INSEAD, had an idea:

Millions had tuned in to watch a man face off against a woman for the first set of co-ed presidential debates in American history. But how would their perceptions change, she wondered, if the genders of the candidates were switched? She pictured an actress playing Trump, replicating his words, gestures, body language, and tone verbatim, while an actor took on Clinton’s role in the same way. What would the experiment reveal about male and female communication styles, and the differing standards by which we unconsciously judge them?

Guadalupe reached out to Joe Salvatore, a Steinhardt clinical associate professor of educational theatre who specializes in ethnodrama — a method of adapting interviews, field notes, journal entries, and other print and media artifacts into a script to be performed as a play. Together, they developed Her Opponent, a production featuring actors performing excerpts from each of the three debates exactly as they happened — but with the genders switched. Salvatore cast fellow educational theatre faculty Rachel Whorton to play “Brenda King,” a female version of Trump, and Daryl Embry to play “Jonathan Gordon,” a male version of Hillary Clinton, and coached them as they learned the candidates’ words and gestures.

[...]

Salvatore says he and Guadalupe began the project assuming that the gender inversion would confirm what they’d each suspected watching the real-life debates: that Trump’s aggression — his tendency to interrupt and attack — would never be tolerated in a woman, and that Clinton’s competence and preparedness would seem even more convincing coming from a man.

[...]

We heard a lot of “now I understand how this happened” — meaning how Trump won the election. People got upset. There was a guy two rows in front of me who was literally holding his head in his hands, and the person with him was rubbing his back. The simplicity of Trump’s message became easier for people to hear when it was coming from a woman — that was a theme. One person said, “I’m just so struck by how precise Trump’s technique is.” Another — a musical theater composer, actually — said that Trump created “hummable lyrics,” while Clinton talked a lot, and everything she was was true and factual, but there was no “hook” to it. Another theme was about not liking either candidate — you know, “I wouldn’t vote for either one.” Someone said that Jonathan Gordon [the male Hillary Clinton] was “really punchable” because of all the smiling. And a lot of people were just very surprised by the way it upended their expectations about what they thought they would feel or experience. There was someone who described Brenda King [the female Donald Trump] as his Jewish aunt who would take care of him, even though he might not like his aunt. Someone else described her as the middle school principal who you don’t like, but you know is doing good things for you.

Posted in Policy | 6 Comments »

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